If you are a member of the Microsoft Windows Feedback Program, you may have been given the chance to use a preview version of PC Advisor recently. {ad}

This new application is basically a monitoring program for Windows Vista that looks at all your settings to make sure no problems can occur. More interestingly though, if something does go wrong it offers solutions in real-time in a bid to limit down time. It also looks like Microsoft will be pushing this as another way of automatically updating your machine with drivers and patches as well as optimizing performance.

The application consists of five different options:

PC Checkup – checks your PC for alerts

Toolbox – an advanced options using tools to configure you PC

Offers – offers you other Microsoft and 3rd party software and services to try

Tutorials – interactive tutorials for Windows and related services

Online help – links to Microsoft online help and support pages

PC Checkup is meant to be the center piece of PC Advisor, touting automatic fixes for common problems, but Maximum PC found this tool and others such as Toolbox to be either limited, or just a wrapper around existing functionality in Windows Vista.

Matthew’s Opinion
This is only a preview release, so we can’t assumer this is final functionality. It looks like the main purpose of PC Advisor is to help those users who have little knowledge of how Vista works, or what tools it already offers.

If Microsoft end up offering the application as a free download for Vista users, then it may be of value to beginners. But if they start charging for it they need to seriously improve the functionality on offer and the performance of the software. Maximum PC tested it to see if it could work out why a game wasn’t working and it couldn’t. The simple problem it needed to figure out was that the video card drivers were not current.

I also don’t like it when software vendors try to combine software marketed as a helpful utility with links to buy more software. The “Offers” option looks to be pure marketing and shouldn’t really form part of a utility application in my opinion. Again, it depends somewhat on whether Microsoft end up charging for PC Advisor, if they don’t then the Offers link can’t really be complained about too much.